Professor Valerie Forrestal, Web Services Librarian at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, will lead a lively discussion about usability issues for mobile web site development. She will discuss various aspects of usability such as consistency, learnability, memorability, and efficiency. Professor Forrestal’s discussion will provoke a great dialogue about best practices when developing mobile web sites.

Dark Patterns are when web designers purposely create user interfaces to confuse the user. According to DarkPatterns.org, they are “user interfaces that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills.”

In the broadest sense, are our libraries designed to create confusing experiences? Are our libraries unintentionally designed like mazes for our users? Are we creating “Dark Patterns” unintentionally on our web sites and in our physical spaces?

o Should reference desk be opened when library is opened or only part of the time?
o Types of questions asked (textbooks, logins, physical location of stacks, library catalog, etc)
o Who staffs the desk?
o Librarians or paraprofessionals or LIS students or I.T. staff?

4. Removal of reference desk and its implications (Queens College and Drexel University)

5. Roving reference service
o Where to do it?
o How to promote it?
o How do we measure its effectiveness?

6. Research Consultations as an alternative to reference services
o Individualized and more flexible
o Who staffs the desk and what types of questions are asked there?

7. Students can’t search
o Library catalog is confusing and not user friendly.
o Students think in keywords
o Millennials/Digital Natives are self-directed.
o Librarians should take advantage of a “teaching moment”
o We need to open their minds that not everything is online.

8. Digital natives resist the “teaching moments” of librarians. They think they know how to search independently.